


Stones and Silks

by Ellegy42



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27983241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellegy42/pseuds/Ellegy42
Summary: Toph might not have many happy memories with her parents, but she does have them.
Relationships: Poppy Beifong & Toph Beifong
Comments: 18
Kudos: 39
Collections: Platonic Ship Fics of AtLA





	Stones and Silks

The chain slides through Toph’s fingers with a light, tinkling flow, ending in a slightly louder _tink_ when the pendant lands in her other hand.

It weighs the same as the first pendant.

Toph sets this one aside and picks up the first one again, probing curiously at the thick links. They weigh the same, and they’re the same length, but this one is thicker and it warms quicker between her hands. 

She sets them aside, one on either side of her – the thick one that changes temperature on her left and the thinner one on her right.

She picks up the next necklace and tilts her head curiously at it. This one is… _curious_. It’s made entirely of heavy, round beads that don’t feel anything like the metals she just set aside, but she’s sure they aren’t any kind of stone, either. When she probes the beads, each one is slightly different, dips and curves in the surfaces slipping beneath her fingers like silk. She likes this one.

She makes a new place for this one on her left and continues to explore her mother’s jewelry collection.

The fourth necklace is another chain, this one thick but soft, like the second one. Each link is intricate, a work of art that she marvels at.

How do people _make_ these things?

Sometimes when she’s being taught earthbending (ha, what she learns doesn’t deserve the name, all she does is _breathe_ ) she imagines that the earth beneath her toes is as stubborn as she; that she must _demand_ it obey her whims. Metal isn’t like that, though, because it isn’t earth. She almost wishes it were, though.

Maybe _this_ metal, this soft metal that doesn’t _want_ to stay in its shape, would be more willing to listen to someone than the stuff that makes up the knives and swords the guards carry, or the holders for the servants’ lanterns.

She’ll have to explore that thought, later, when she isn’t playing with her mother’s jewelry. Maybe she can find some bit of metal to try to mold, later.

Delicately, almost reverently, Toph sets this one beside the second necklace; they are the same, even if the gems they hold are different. She picks up the next necklace and finds that it is yet another of this soft, strange metal.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if someone were to tell her their names? Tell her what makes iron, gold, steel, pearl, silver, copper, bronze, different from each other? Which ones are which, beyond _gold_ and _silver_ and _pearl_ for jewelry; _steel_ for good swords but _iron_ for bad ones? Why do _pearl_ and _gold_ go on both knives and jewelry, but _iron_ is used only for tools and weapons? She knows from listening to the talk around her that they have bronze on some of the sconces, but all she knows about sconces are that they are sometimes warm, sometimes cold, and must be polished.

She sets the chain aside and moves on to the next, one part of her pleased to have found something different from the previous two and another displeased because she was curious about what other shapes that metal might be made into.

Whatever.

It isn’t like she’s never going to be able to feel them again.

This necklace is made of the same stuff as the first one though its links are thicker and more ornate, like the fourth one, though the designs are not curved, but instead patterns that branch off from each other like when she touches the bushes in the gardens and follows their branches from the flowers in to the thicker stumps. This necklace, she sets to her left with its companion.

Next is another beaded necklace, though the beads aren’t anything like the ones from that other one she’d found. These beads are rougher, more irregular in shape with infinitely more dips and protrusions, notches and bulges. If the other beaded necklace was silk, then this one is the cotton of the servants’ robes or the wool of their winter cloaks. The beads are lighter, too, not even half the weight of the others but with twice the character. The only similarities they seem to share are the facts that they are beads, and that neither necklace is composed of either stone or metal.

She spends a long time exploring these beads, feeling their imperfections and flaws, running them between her fingers and pausing over the smoother, heavier beads made of stones clustered together on the opposite end from the clasp. Most of these ones are almost completely round, polished to her questing fingers, but two or three of them are covered in tiny ridges that buzz when she rolls them beneath her nails.

Tracing even the roughest of these stone beads is only a kitten-owls soft down, while the lighter, not-stone ones feel like the coarse wool the ostrich-horses sleep under in the winter, or like tracing a stone with her nails even though they _aren’t_.

Toph is _fascinated_.

She keeps this necklace in her lap to explore further when she’s finished examining all of the other ones – it’s the most interesting so far – and carries on with her explorations.

Toph finds a necklace made of stone beads entirely unlike the stone beads on the necklace that wasn’t made of stone, glass, or metal; one made of the soft metal but that has that same sort of stone as a pendant, carved with some intricate design she can’t give a name to. She finds chains of the soft metal with polished stone pendants (not the same as the carved stone, but the ones from that one, strange necklace – most of her mother’s jewelry has these glassy, many-ridged stones, she finds). There are chains of heavy materials and light, more of the beads like silk and a few of the stuff that wants-to-be-stone-but-isn’t.

Some of the necklaces are made of a single strand – some only as long as her forearm, others long enough to touch the ground – and others are four or more strands bound together. Some are thick, some are thin, and some have designs so intricate Toph traces them again and again because she finds something new each time she does.

Then, once she’s satisfied her curiosity for the chains themselves – there’s so much to _see_ , she could trace them for hours and not get bored but she _does_ want to examine the stones before her mother finds her – she turns her attention to the pendants, which are just as fascinating as the chains are.

The pendants of stone (not the stone that is mostly carved, though) are inevitably wrapped in one of the two metals, polished to be either smooth or with the many flat faces that are easier to identify when the pendant isn’t smaller than the nail on her little finger. These are all similar, so similar she almost can’t tell the difference between them, but she listens to the stone beneath her nails, feels it and speaks to it with light touches until she can tell the differences.

Some of these gems ring clear beneath her fingers when she taps them (not to her ears, of course) while others echo like the trowel she once convinced the gardener to let her use to plant flowers and others ring with something entirely different.

She’s nearly done, tucking one necklace into the soft-metal-rings-like-bells pile when her mother enters the room and gasps.

Toph winces – Mother doesn’t like it when she’s in here alone and prepares to be scolded for wandering away from her governess yet again.

She doesn’t _like_ her governess, who treats her like she’s more fragile than the most delicate porcelain in the entire house.

“Toph, how did you do this?” Mother asks, her voice high with surprise.

“I didn’t break anything,” Toph protests, “I’m being careful, I just wanted to feel them. They’re pretty.”

“And nobody helped you with this?” Her mother asks, still more astounded than Toph has ever heard her.

“Why would I want help?” Toph asks, puzzled.

Her mother is silent for a long moment before she sits next to Toph and hands her a necklace. “Where does this one go?”

Toph’s fingers skim the metal (the one that warms in her fingers, the one that’s lighter than the soft metal) and she taps the gem until she feels it ringing clearly beneath her nails. She sets it aside with the other one like it.

Her mother says nothing.

Toph waits another moment for the scolding that doesn’t come, then asks the question that’s been burning in her mind. “What’s this metal called?”

“That’s silver, darling.”

“And this one?” The soft metal.

“That’s gold.” Mother takes her hand and guides it to the heavy beads.

Toph moves to the heavy beads, and her mother tells her they are pearls. “Where do they come from?” She asks. “They aren’t stone.”

“No, they aren’t,” Mother says, a pleased note in her voice. “Oyster-shrimp and crab-clams make them when sand gets into their shells.”

Mother guides her hand to the carved stone and tells her it is called Jade, then to the light, curious stone that isn’t a stone and tells her it’s a stone called amber.

“No it isn’t,” Toph says.

“What do you mean?” Mother asks, and Toph tilts her head.

“It isn’t a stone,” she repeats. “It isn’t a stone like the pearls aren’t a stone.”

“How can you tell?” Mother asks.

“I dunno. It just sounds different. Like these ones” – rings-like-a-bell – “sound different from these ones” – echoes-like-a-trowel.

“Perhaps I’ll ask a jeweler about it,” Mother says after a minute, then Toph asks her to continue telling her which gems are which. She finds that the rings-like-a-bell stone is called a diamond, and the one that echoes-like-a-trowel is a sapphire; that a few of them are called rubies. Toph learns about copper and bronze and emeralds and colored glass.

Mother tells her, when she presses, that rubies are the colors of glowing coal; that emeralds and jade look like grass and leaves; that sapphires are the color of the sky and amber of fire. She finds that silver looks like the moon and that gold and bronze are the color of the sun.

They spend the rest of the day together, Mother gently guiding her to different stones and metals in the house and letting her feel the way they sing to her fingers. Mother lets her touch hair pieces and necklaces, rings and forks and teacups with gold filigree and a sconce on the wall that isn’t lit (they are meant to hold candles for light, Toph learns) and a pewter jug and an iron grate in front of the fireplace (Mother won’t let her touch a knife, but that’s alright, Toph has learned so _much_ today).

At dinner she feels the silver of the fork and spoon in front of her and finds that there is gold in the _tablecloth_ , which surprises her and makes her mother laugh and her father start coughing in surprise.

Toph goes to sleep that night satisfied, pleased at having spent time with Mother where she was allowed to _learn_ and _feel_ and be herself for an entire day.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I totally just wrote 2k words about Toph playing with her mom's jewelry. Feel free to drop a review.
> 
> Edit: I fixed the sapphire/ruby mixup - thanks to Kuzon for the comment that made me notice I'd gotten them backwards, by the way. Sapphires and rubies are both made of a mineral called corundum, but trace impurities (iron for blue sapphires and chromium for rubies) give them their colors. Clear diamonds are pretty much pure carbon unless they have impurities that give them color. Amber, on the other hand, isn't actually a stone - it's fossilized tree resin.  
> https://www.langerman-diamonds.com/encyclopedia/about-colors/other-colored-gems/rubies-sapphires-and-emeralds.html


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